As the field of healthcare continues to become more specialized, the provision of services by many healthcare workers and/or providers to many patients may increase. In order to accomplish this, healthcare delivery has been organized into specialized departments or healthcare sources such as, for example, nursing, laboratory, pharmacy, and radiology departments. Each department has the responsibility for accomplishing its particular, often specialized, subset of tasks. Sometimes the departments are associated with different healthcare enterprises or offices having different geographic locations. Unfortunately, this has resulted in sub-optimal healthcare operations because patient information related to a single patient that is stored at various departments may not be easily accessible from a single place.
Conventional healthcare information systems (HIS) combine patient related information for a particular patient from multiple, different healthcare sources into a single consolidated database, having a master patient index (MPI), using various record matching techniques. However, these systems may experience many problems and may not provide very accurate results. For example, the conventional record matching techniques may incorrectly combine two patient's information if two patients have the same name. Furthermore, conventional record matching techniques may combine multiple copies of the same patient information creating a duplicate record or may not locate critical patient information that is related to the same patient, which may result in an improper diagnosis. Current matching techniques may generate an unacceptable number of false matches, duplicate matches and/or miss matches. Conventional methods for storing and/or accessing medical data in and/or from databases that attempt to address the problems discussed above, are discussed in, for example, United States Patent Publication Nos. US 2003/0088438 and US 2003/0177132. However, there is a need for improved record matching techniques to allow generation of a combined patient record that can be relied upon for the provision of healthcare to the patient.